More than one eulogy of violence graces the preface by Jean-Paul Sartre in the ultimate book of Frantz Fanon. Heralded early in the text as the double murder by which a new people will be born, the ending ventures to say that violence may heal the wounds it inflicted (cicatriser les blessures qu’elle a faites) on the oppressor, permitting the latter to return to health again, after the sine qua non of defeat.
In this conclusion, not the liberating but the curative power of violence is lauded; this further variety of approval might send a reader back to his words describing the other and its operations. That ecstatic or liminal state into which those who exert the violence are thrown for a definite period of time, as he outlined it, puts in doubt whether the author had fathomed its nature very well, preoccupied as he gave every sign of being to skew the profile of it to suit his own conceptuality.
A cross-light shone by the later upon the earlier account of violence, the encomium to the liberation which violence is said to bring about, in its turn focuses attention back in the other direction, upon the notion of violence’s wondrous efficacy as an instrument both military and medical.
Un tube avait disparu, mais étaient apparus trente, parfois quarante nouveaux feuillets d’écriture sartrienne. Parfois calme, apaisée, linéaire – les mots agglutinés les uns aux autres –, l’écriture bleue de chat se déroulait, tonique, allant de l’avant et penchée vers la droite, s’allongeant verticalement, plongeant, mais toujours maîtrisée. Et puis, de temps en temps, c’était l’orage, la secousse, la décharge, le délire incontrôlé : mots torturés, déformés, monstrueux, tordus vers la gauche, tordus vers le bas, étirés, élargis, anarchiques, bondissant hors des lignes, rapetissés ou exagérément agrandis, ivres. […] Dans un flot urgent de mots affolés, d’idées juxtaposées, compactes, parfois mal intégrées. Dans les crises d’hyperexcitation, dans les cycles de drogues fonctionnant dans tous les sens, marche avant, marche arrière, stop, marche avant et ainsi de suite… dans une lutte folle contre lui-même, contre un corps fatigué, contre le temps et contre le sommeil. Et de doses de géant.
— Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre, pt. iv, “Vous êtes formidables…”
The Sartrean constructs in this preface I leave aside; of some relevance and very curious, is the mode in which it was written up. The author’s production during those years was lent much of its energy by a steady consumption of Corydrane pills, amphetamine and aspirin in one, favoured by university students and intellectuels in Paris until 1971, when it was phased out, by reason of its toxicity.* These he imbibed beyond the total recommended dosage, to the point that the lines he was propelled so rapidly by these means to write, at times seemed to aim at that hallowed poetic ideal: un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens – without exactly attaining it, as implicitly, delicately the biographer grants with a tinge of dismay, while she replicates her subject’s results by accentuating the rhapsodic qualities in her own prose. Hence the lucidités to which their usage at other times did conduce, were dearly purchased even in literary terms, while the cumulative impact upon his personal condition proved to be devastating in the longer run.
* See Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre, pt. iv, “Vous êtes formidables…”
His preface dates from the same period, and from its content, too, indications of artificial assistance rush out, so vehemently are the main ideas phrased. The closer one listens to the words, the more clearly may one hear Corydrane. – Had one eyes for its visage, the sight would likely be hideous. – Upon this “écriture sartrienne” an artificial imprint was left, so it seems, not merely an impetus lent to these pages to start with. Awareness of the synthetic sound, which re-reading might concretise, can bring the incoherence and fracture in his position to the fore. Violence and if need be murder as the one-off event of liberation, from out of whose condition of ecstasy (the ἔκστασις existentialists generally sought to revisit) new free people would be born or reborn and the possibilities of fraternity too, espoused under the influence of a drug of which the cumulative effects were killing and the usage had become habitual and inescapable: what then was he inflicting upon himself, over and over again, if not an insidious violence? If so, the situation begins to disclose facets of dark humour, even irony, though a Sartrean ear would not perceive them. Yet they, that refusal notwithstanding, might give a cue to further reflection.
So: are narcotics violence in encapsulated form? – The metaphor or simile, if it is one, has a long history.*
* Here the expression “encapsulated form” is meant not altogether literally. – Pertinent are the researches in Łukasz Kamieński’s book, Shooting Up: A History of Drugs in Warfare.
‘I suppose,’ said Lady Bennerley, contemplatively, ‘if the love-business went, something else would take its place. Morphia, perhaps. A little morphine in all the air. It would be wonderfully refreshing for everybody.’
‘The government releasing ether into the air on Saturdays, for a cheerful weekend!’ said Jack. ‘Sounds all right, but where should we be by Wednesday?’
‘So long as you can forget your body you are happy,’ said Lady Bennerley. ‘And the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So, if civilization is any good, it has to help us to forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it.’
‘Help us to get rid of our bodies altogether,’ said Winterslow. ‘It’s quite time man began to improve on his own nature, especially the physical side of it.’
‘Imagine if we floated like tobacco smoke,’ said Connie.— D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ch. 7
Applied in retrograde fashion, already decades before the 1961 preface, the idea would sharpen the point of some of the literary conversations in London during the late 1920s, as the last novel of D. H. Lawrence memorably re-created them; whence Brave New World was to sketch the dystopia of a totalitarian society held together inwardly not least through pharmacology. By encapsulated violence, most difficulties posed by objectors and dissenters would be precluded.
At the other pole of this subset of dystopian literature, violence as it appears in Nineteen Eighty-Four is anything but encapsulated. Nowhere does one find in those environs any semblance of pacification. Already, by the brutality of it all, thrills were engendered which the inmates came to require with some regularity. Thus the simile or metaphor clarifies in both directions: amidst such circumstances narcotics and violence are mutually akin. Assiduously the totalitarian state must tend to managing the conditions under which everyone becomes addicted to the violent, in permissive acceptance of its entire spectrum. Soon enough everything will tend to be regarded subliminally under this aspect. (For instance, the manifold re-writings of the historical record are not obviously concealed; they are known to occur, delivering a frisson on account of the moment of violation implicit in them and, even more, in the general complicity which covers them in silence.)
The prospective character of Orwell’s novel is less pronounced than Huxley’s, and there was by the gestation-period of A Clockwork Orange no longer much cause for the fiction to jump ahead. Calibrations of narcotics* and violence became the stuff of everyday life, and how ever one might prefer to term the zones of the personality in which their appeals had come to lodge, whether in second natures or amongst needs, the crucial point is the sheer difficulty of extricating them, clearing a way for some fresh start. – The effort to do so, might avail itself of just the same potent means or similar. Quandary after quandary, piling up in further surfeits!
* This term I find preferable to the word “drugs,” as under its broader scope other items than pharmaceutical creations are comprised with less friction: the nascent pop music and television programmes that were much on the mind of Burgess’ novel, did quickly begin to furnish, due to their soporific and/or stimulating, that is, narcotic, qualities, experiences without which life became difficult for many. And much the same holds for today’s social media, above and beyond their functions.
In the absence of the sights and the sounds of violence circulated by the media precisely on account of the thrill, the brief upsurge of energy they provoked in their recipients, in advance of the next encounter, the société du spectacle would not have become the all-pervasive framework as which it has been typified since the 1960s. Much as earlier in the century, when mass-society really made its debut, space became marked by the perplexing awareness of its being “full” (lleno)* and overfull, so too during the later period with the immaterial arenas through which unprecedented numbers of visual and aural messages flitted. Then the oppressive crowding of these realms which resulted quickly became a challenge to literature; and thus the decade that Burgess had ushered in, Ballard escorted out, leaving behind himself something like a sonic hologram of the new territory, in the shape of that formal experiment, The Atrocity Exhibition (curated for situationists).
* See José Ortega y Gasset, La rebelión de las masas, pt. i, i.
Exhibits of atrocities, optic and acoustic images derived or if need be fabricated from war-zones abroad or at home, fostered the thrill of violence and then sated the hunger for a time, before it awoke and the process commenced again. – Such alternations are comprised in the metabolism with violent sounds and sights of anyone’s second nature, as it develops in the society of the spectacle: they, more than most others, supply the operating energy for this life-form. To call these needs “addictive,” therefore, may even understate their almost mechanical necessity.
Rather than start at the beginning of each chapter, as in a conventional novel, simply turn the pages until a paragraph catches your eye. If the ideas or images seem interesting, scan the nearby paragraphs for anything that resonates in an intriguing way. Fairly soon, I hope, the fog will clear, and the underlying narrative will reveal itself. In effect, you will be reading the book in the way it was written.
— J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, “Author’s Note” (2001)
Throughout the immaterial interstices of the société du spectacle, the wreckage of previous transmissions accumulated, and at times the bits of its debris even did agglomerate; accordingly, throughout the novel it is a number of these atrocious composites which are exhibited.
Surrealist painters already had intuited how these distasteful collations came to be pieced together, under conditions replete in semic rubble. Mindful of those works where such assembly-processes were translated into an image (without effacing the traces), the author intensified his awareness of the spaces of his own times in their newly suffused state. So schooled in earnest, he then set out to devise a fresh approach by which some sense of all these disorienting settings could adequately be conveyed: through a bewildering reduction of narrative. – Moreover, it seems likely a reminiscence of the precursor also led him to this practice: the innovation that was made with Nadsat, he sought to outdo by blowing up the constituents of his narration. – Of those treated in such a twofold way, prominent was the refuge some hoped to obtain from the spectacle and its immaterial plenitude, namely, the self and the delights its shelter might give them: implicitly this longing did provide a main topic his novel circled around, being thus both enlarged and emptied. The great temptation of it he seemed to grant, while alerting to its errant vanity. Amidst present conditions, those reflected in this literary exhibition of a narrative, for its author too in effect the self is even more obviously what it was already said to be in the 1920s, that most terrible drug we ingest in solitude (jene fürchterlichste Droge – uns selber –, die wir in der Einsamkeit zu uns nehmen),* and on this account the encapsulated violence of its usage, even in the smaller doses one might now and again administer to oneself, probably ought to be contra-indicated, neither taken for, nor taken as an antidote. (Even its analgesic efficacy would quickly wear out.)
* To cite the memorable phrase of Walter Benjamin, in his essay on Surrealism as the “latest snapshot of the European intelligentsia.”
From such a self to the tremulous pleasure taken in the prospect of anyone’s own violent demise, as acute observers began to witness this disconcerting attitude in the years before 1939, there were but a few steps. Shocking it must have been to note, towards the decade’s end, how that death then hovered ahead as a remedy for a terrible habit inflicted upon them not least by themselves (where this fate was entertained not only individually but also as a simulacrum of commonality).
Was the particular appeal of totalitarian murder, especially in its German variety, also a form of encapsulated violence, with an efficacy something like a drug’s? This would be a thought to mull over, given that the appeal is broadcast again, this time through all the channels whose metabolic function, in the society of the spectacle as it exists today, is the widest possible transmission of quanta of violent thrills.
Whether the intoxicating signal itself can be interrupted or even switched off, is too large a question to broach, clearly.* How to wean oneself from its pleasures, even now, is worthier of attention.
* Though I should not like to hand it over to those who prefer artificial paradises or ruminations on such problems as whether it is the case that only a god, an event, or a dialectical process could save us.
Will the immaterial trash left behind when the thrill dies down ever be discarded?